


High Places

by emkaaaay



Category: PIERCE Tamora - Works, The Immortals - Tamora Pierce, The Song of the Lioness - Tamora Pierce, Tortall - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Canon Character of Color, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Gen, Minor Character Death, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-12
Updated: 2014-07-12
Packaged: 2018-02-08 13:44:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1943367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emkaaaay/pseuds/emkaaaay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Summer, 452 HE.  Queen Thayet and a city at war.</p>
            </blockquote>





	High Places

** Summer, 452 HE **

 

This was how the nightmares went, that summer: Thanhyien was burning. Thayet had been in Tortall by the time it happened, all those years back, but it felt like a memory. The flames were higher than the stacks of bodies.  It was always night.

The quiet got to her, in these dreams.  Fire wasn't quiet. Tonight a boy too young for a beard lay by a temple, a Hau Ma dagger still in his hand .  He'd been real, she knew.  Out of all the anonymous corpses they'd found on the road to Rachia it was his face she remembered.  Beside him lay her nurse, who hadn't died like that-- but look, there was every wrinkle and gray hair.  Thayet walked for minutes, hours.  Ruined streets. She saw no one living, but at some point the soldiers' footsteps began.  Murder-voices crept toward her down the alleys.  Nineteen again, she looked for a hiding place behind door after locked door.  One white door opened onto a staircase.  Don't, said everything inside her, because she knew what happened at the top. 

The fires were drawing closer now, eating through a street that was stone-paved instead of lined with paint.  It was Corus burning around her, and when she looked back at the boy with the dagger he had Roald's face.

She fought the swoop of darkness that followed until she understood that she'd woken in her bedroom.  The day began.

\---

The tallest tower in Corus was Balor’s Needle, of course, but the roof of the smiths’ guild was the highest spot outside the palace gates.  A serving girl had jumped from it last month after her sweetheart died at Legann.  People brought flowers, buns.  They were fresh every morning when Thayet rode by with her train, although she never saw who brought them. 

By coincidence, the shrine marked the halfway point of these rides.  She refused to admit to her advisers (almost to a person, they opposed these rides) how relieved she always was to reach it.  She believed in seeing people, even when the people in question—miles of them—stared stone-faced back. It had taken her until June to realize what felt so familiar: this was the same route they’d ridden those first few months in Tortall, during the lead-up to the Coronation.  The Lower City was quiet in that same eerie way.  She remembered how jarring she’d found it, after Udayapur’s healthy roar.  She remembered Duke Roger’s small mad smile, and the set of Jon’s mouth.  It had felt like Thanhyien, she’d thought then.  It felt that way again.

She pulled her mind back to the present, to the muggy morning.  They’d made a small party back in the Great Gate’s shadow—today, it was Thayet, Buri, Harailt, and Wyldon's guards—but as always, the horses seemed to grow as the houses shrank.  Now, in the Lower City, they loomed. 

It was so quiet she could hear the Royal Forest birds a half-mile away.  Harailt had paused for breath, and Buri and Wyldon spent these rides trying to out-sullen one another.  The palace training master rode with her almost daily— In Raoul’s absence, the final responsibility for the royal family’s safety rested with him.  She was glad, of course, that he took his duties seriously.  In a perfect world, he might have done so without wincing in distaste every time they met.  His sensible boots, she noticed, were worn almost through at the heels and toes.  Thayet didn’t hold with exhibitions of thrift by people who’d never been hungry, although she knew better than to say so at court. 

It wasn’t until Manyat whuffled under her, catching a scent, that she looked toward the birds. Their calls were growing louder, growing strange. Feathers caught the light in a way that feathers shouldn't.  The whole party recognized them in the same beat, but it was Thayet who spoke. 

“Stormwings.” 

It was a gaggle of a few dozen, all swirling around a central figure that was flying too high to make out.  Although the archers tracked them as they approached the open ground of Palace Way, each Immortal was holding up conspicuously empty hands.  They could still have done damage, had they chosen, although the guards outnumbered them enough to turn the tide. 

“That’s going to catch up to us,” she said, half to herself.  “We keep forgetting the storms-cursed enemy can fly.”  She’d always appreciated that, when translated literally into Common, K’miri swearwords just sounded quaint.  It gave her a certain amount of wiggle room.

“So can arrows,” said Buri, sighting along one.

The Stormwings pulled up at a safe distance and circled, screaming and clanging.  Even from here she could smell them. 

“What are they saying?” someone asked behind her. 

Wyldon saved her from repeating it, his sour voice suddenly appropriate.

“‘Ozorne sends his greetings.’  Something about Royal Forest nests.  Profanities.” He paused to strain his ears. "Additional profanities."

Buri snorted. "Tell me it's not actually--"

"It's him," Harailt said grimly.  Amber magic was ebbing around his hand; he'd sent a querying burst of it upwards. "Ozorne.  He's wrapped in so many strange little anti-arrow magics that it's hard to feel him, but… one knows.  He's not a mage anymore, but one knows." 

Beside Thayet, Buri shot.  The other Stormwings made no attempt to block the arrow, which swerved around the dreadlocked leader as if passing a magnet.  The flock continued to caw.  Windows that had slammed shut along the street crept open as people looked out at the nobles staring upward. Ozorne had gotten the spectacle he wanted, she realized, and allowed her guard to steer them back toward the Palace. The Stormwings circled once more behind her and then spun toward the Royal Forest. 

“—over _Corus_ —” she heard someone mutter as they reached the gates, voice bewildered. “How— _how_?”

That was the thing, she thought sometimes  Everyone else seemed stunned by this war. Middle-aged men staggered around the palace like old ones.  A cold part of Thayet (her snake-brain, Kalasin had called it) felt puzzled.  Wasn’t there something inevitable about it?  Wasn’t this, after all, how ruling went?

“It’s like you’ve been _waiting_ for something like this,” Jon had hissed at her last summer-- but that hadn't been about the war, had it.  She could picture him pacing in long, caged steps across the floor of her new room.  It had been the first month after Kally had found her in the stables and told her in Jon’s words about the duty of a queen.  He’d still been baffled by what seemed to him like rage out of nowhere, anger totally out of proportion to his sin.  “It’s like you’ve been waiting all these years for some—some chance to feel betrayed.”  

“How lucky you gave me one, then,” she’d shot back, safe in the ice-place beyond shouting.  “How kind.”

She was never entirely sure how that long winter between them had resolved itself.  How much of the truce came with war duties, and how much was plain old loneliness?  She’d held out almost a year.  Knowing only the broad outlines of her childhood, he’d underestimated what kind of isolation she could bear, what kind of humiliation.  The shock on his face when she’d moved out had been satisfying. 

For her part, she’d forgotten how much that bearing cost. 

War came, annihilating the sort of nuanced futures they’d been arguing about.  They’d touched for the first time in ten months after some horrible spidren skirmish.  When they’d finished, he’d looked at her with the same sort of gods-damned _hope_ that had kept her here in the first place, and she’d let him stay.  She tried not to think ahead, these days.

\---

When the news came Thayet was sitting with her children, for once. The oldest two and fragile Lianne were far away, hidden with Kourrem and George in the heart of Persepolis, but Liam and Jasson and tiny Vania were here with her in Corus. She’d kept them here because she’d thought it would be safer, she remembered.  Depending on her mood, that either made her smile or sealed her throat.

Kalasin, Thayet reminded herself often, had held that most of mothering was just _being with_ one’s children. Make them feel loved, push them to be smart, and then leave well enough alone.  She was sitting on the carpet with Vania warm in her lap, talking to Liam and Jasson as they chased a red ball.  It was Onua Chamtong whom the guards admitted, Onua whose face looked so wooden, and so Thayet knew immediately what was wrong.

Vania cried when Thayet handed her back to young Senna, who rushed off into a dim corner to hush her.  Vania knew Senna’s arms and quieted fast.  The boys ran to her with questions, leaving their ball.  The dismay was clearer on Jasson’s little face than Liam’s—like Roald, like Kally, Liam was already learning about masks. That snake part of Thayet’s brain that never stopped moving ticked off these notes as she stood, said something reassuring to her sons, and walked out.

The door closed.

“It’s Buri,” Thayet said, voice even.

“She’s alive,” Onua said, eyes frightened and chin tough.  “Hurroks on the ramparts; they caught her ribs.  The healers are with her now.”

“How bad?”

Onua’s eyes flickered down and back up in the beat before she spoke, and Thayet’s lungs knotted.

“She’s bled a lot.  They—they don’t know.” She paused.  “They’re in the infirmary.”

Thayet walked, putting the full length of her legs into it. It seemed like a lapse that she hadn’t start walking as soon as they’d stepped outside; her brain was running a dangerous two beats behind what was happening around her. Onua matched her stride, talking softly, voice easier now that they were moving.

“It sounds like Askew was out shooting at centaurs when a pair of those cursed beasts streaked in out of nowhere.  They got Miri, and Buri tried to grab her.  The others took out a hurrok and got them down. Miri—Miri’s in a bad way.”

The hush of the Rider barracks was worse than the raucous rush it fell into during emergencies.  Everyone stood waiting in corners, out of the errand-runners’ way.  Everyone was whispering until they saw the queen, and then everyone was mute. The two women crossed in silence to the double door that hid the infirmary and knocked. 

A small, bright space.  Three partition-guarded beds, two full, and closest to the door was oh, Miri Fisher.  A grim-mouthed healer stood watch beside her, doing very little, and a sodden pad hid the softest part of her belly.  Thayet’s gut clenched at the doom-stink, minimized by magic, of cut innards.  People were moving by the next bed, beyond the screen, but a sound behind Thayet alerted her to the presence of Evin Larse. He was huddled on the floor instead of the chairs beside him, blood on his face where he’d rubbed it. Meeting his eyes felt like the plunging jerk that sometimes yanked Thayet off the path to sleep— Evin’s eyes weren’t a place heartbreak belonged.  He was crying silently, in a marathon sort of way, although none of this could have happened much more than half an hour ago. 

"Majesty, it came up behind her," he said hoarsely, voice startling against the quiet, "and then she turned just as it was on her, and-- and the Commander tried to push her down and another one was _right there,_ out of _nowhere,_ and--"

Thayet made an inarticulate hushing noise, the kind she'd use with Jasson, and crouched down beside him.  He was sobbing now, still with a minimum of noise. 

"I'm so sorry," she said, as she always did in these infirmary corners. It was such a miserably small thing to say, so achingly far from enough, and in ten years of being queen she'd found nothing better.  "It's good that you're here with her."  In speaking Common she realized distantly that she and Onua had both spoken K'mir.

Evin, shaking, went to stand.  Thayet and Onua helped him.  He lurched to the chair that a healer pulled out for him beside the bed and touched Miri’s small left hand, which someone had wiped clean of blood.  Evin's own hands were gory, as was his tunic-- they were only in tunics, both of them, against those claws.  As Thayet turned away Farant slouched in, head low, to stand beside him. They'd all been year-mates, hadn't they, only three summers ago.  Miri hadn't known how to ride.

Only then did Thayet move past the partition.

Here there was urgent movement, which buoyed her until she saw the evil gash along Buri's side.  Her eyes were closed and her face was gray and the cot, her clothes, the healers' hands-- everything was red.  They'd cut away her tunic to get at the wound, leaving one breast exposed.  The careless obscenity of it made it seem less like Buri this was happening to than some doll. Thayet's mind flashed mad pictures of Vania's dolls, of Kally's, of her own in a long-burned palace. She stepped forward.

Kuri Taylor's haggard eyes flicked up.

"They're bringing help from the city, majesty," she said. "Stay by the wall there unless she wakes-- I daren't put her too far under." 

Thayet nodded; moved her lips; stood by the wall.  Onua was still there, she realized.  Thayet heard her chanting prayers as time passed, barely whispering. Once Sarge burst in, surveyed the scene, and walked out without a word.  A new vein opened briefly in Buri's ribs, splashing blood until they sealed it.  After far too long a boy with his university robes half-on arrived at a run, crystal-pale power swelling from him as Kuri steered his fingers into place.

A convulsive sob came through the divider as the healers told Evin that Miri Fisher was dead.  He stumbled through a few minutes later to ask after his Commander; Thayet towed him toward the door with a mother-voice that belonged to someone else. The words seemed separate from her: the healers are still working, we'll know more soon, I'm so sorry sorry sorry. She heard them carry Miri's body away, although she could tell they were trying to be quiet.

Buri half-woke only once, suddenly, her face twisting in agony even before her eyelids fluttered.  Her body stiffened and the healers muttered in panic; Kuri was summoning sleep against her patient's forehead by the time Thayet took her first step across the room. When she reached the bed Buri was sinking back into unconsciousness, but Thayet could see her struggling against it, caught in a haze of pain and fear. 

"Don't fight," Thayet told her in K'mir.  This was not her mother-voice, or her queen-voice, or anything but afraid.  She reached frantically for the way either of their own mothers would have said it, touching her friend’s clammy hand.  "Don't you dare fight this." 

Buri's eyes might have registered her face before they closed. When she was limp the healers began their work again.

A hand on her arm was a serving girl, Memen, bearing food. There were no windows in this room, so it could be any time at all.  She turned away the warm bread but took the water skin and swirled sip after sip around her tongue, trying to wash away the stickiness.  Kuri and the boy were slowing, their power ebbing from focused bursts to a faint, general glow.  Kuri looked up at last, mouth sagging in exhaustion. 

“She’s got to rest, now,” she rasped.  “Can’t do much more than close it all, when the body’s so worn out. We’ll lay sleep on her, and see in the morning how it takes.”

Memen was already there with her tray.  The university boy grabbed a cup of water, swallowed it in one go, and sat panting.  She mutely gave him another. 

“You did well,” Kuri told him, touching his shoulder.

He flinched away.

“I’ve never done it like this, mum,” he said, looking at his lap. “Not like this. I’m sorry I don’t know more.”

Thayet noticed for the first time how young he was—perhaps fourteen, all limbs and bad skin.  The students were spread out around the kingdom too, she remembered.  They’d deployed so many mages back when they thought Corus far enough from the sea to be safe.  Alanna was at Legann, and Baird was riding with Daine and Numair, and for the half-dead Commander of the Riders there was this boy.

“You did well,” Kuri repeated firmly.  “You did what I told you, and you didn’t panic.  What’s your name?”

The boy swallowed, his eyes darting to Thayet.

“Ulren, mum.”  He had the dark eyes and slender build of a Hillman.  “Ulren Ives. Is—do we need to go help that girl?”

He pointed toward the other bed, now empty behind its partition. Kuri put her thumbs to her temples and sighed.

“No, lad,” she said.  “No, we don’t.”

Buri was still now, face slack and putty-colored.  The narrow bed was made to accommodate tall men, and there was close to a foot left over on either end.  She had no pillow.  Thayet felt that there should be a blanket over her, although of course there couldn’t be, and the room was warm.

Kuri sent the boy out with Memen, and her team began what Thayet recognized as preparations for a long wait—a cleaning magic for the sheets, a mop for the floor.  The healer slumped back in her chair, eyes closing with one hand on Buri’s wrist. A swell of gratitude brought tears welling up in Thayet’s eyes.  She started to say something unsteady, but Kuri waved her away. Kuri didn’t hold with sentiment, Thayet remembered.  It was one of the reasons she and Buri got along.

Thayet forced herself to stop in the hall and speak to several knots of Riders, trying to break the strangled hush of fear.  Duke Gareth met her by the barracks door. She wondered how long he’d been waited.

“How is our young commander?” he asked, in his dry way. Buri was a favorite with this reserved man, who could have hated them both for the way they’d changed his realm under his feet. 

“They’ve stopped the bleeding,” she told him.  “We’ll know more in the morning.”

He nodded, well enough acquainted with battlefields to take that on its own terms. He’d sit with the children, he said, while she rode out. It was evening, now. A few drops of rain had fallen, but now the clouds were rolling past.  The streets felt damp, and dry, and empty. 

\---

Very late that night the mirror around her neck grew warm. She’d been sitting by her fire, staring stupidly at a map—these after-midnight hours were Jon’s territory, not hers.  Numair had given the two of them these mirrors, with an arcane explanation of the power involved. Thayet had retained only the knowledge that she shouldn’t use them often. Her heart sped up as she reached for it, as Jon’s face resolved and wavered and resolved.  Behind him she recognized Legann’s large hall, which was now an infirmary.  He was in one corner, with healers moving among the cots behind him in the dim light.

“We’re fine,” he said immediately, then sighed.  “Well.  Besieged by fairytale creatures and two countries and mysterious spies. But, in the scheme of things…” He scrubbed a hand quickly up his face, exhaustion visible in his skin and eyes, and then refocused. She wondered what she looked like in his glass.  “I heard about Buri.” 

Thayet nodded, feeling emptied out of anything useful to say.

“How is she?” he asked, steady and quiet. 

“Resting.” Her voice sounded muffled. “They’ll do more in the morning.” She was saying the same thing she had to Evin, she realized, although she’d like to tell the truth. She supposed this technically _was_ the truth; of course she’d told Evin the factual truth; and yet the tidiness of it ripped at her like a lie. She tried and failed to find a way to find a better way to say how Buri was, and why it mattered. Alanna—and Buri—thought the worst part of being queen had to do with court balls.  Really it was these nights when you lost track of the lines between what you said and what you meant, what you acted like and who you were.

“How are _you_?” Jon asked, only the barest bit tentative.

“I’m all right,” she said, and he nodded and was quiet.

She sat with her head against the chair’s back, listening to the small sounds that came through the mirror from behind him.  She’d nursed their children here. The familiar anger rolled through her, and irritation that he’d thought she needed checking on, and resentment that he was right, and the animal comfort of his familiar breath. She wished, suddenly and hard, that he was here with her.  She also wished they could stay just like this, ruling separate cities and breathing together in the dark.

He’d heard from George, he told her a few minutes later. Kally was learning to trick-ride from the Bloody Hawk children.  All of them were getting tan.  He gave some small news about Legann and told her he loved her without any clear expectation that she would say it back.  They said good night.  She stared a while longer at the maps. 

\---

At dawn she trained in her bedchamber for ten minutes less than she should have.  The idea of entering the practice courts alone made her more exhausted than she liked to be so early.

Post-bath, her days began with meetings.  As usual, lately, these puttered off into frustration.  No one had much to add to yesterday’s news from Legann: a Yamani fleet on the horizon, and the Scanrans gone like rats ahead of the light.

“It’s maddening,” Gary said at the end, after the junior advisers had trickled out. “Ozorne’s _here_ , but our firepower’s strung out from Corus to the sea. He’s still cocooned in those ugly little spells that make him impossible to hit from a distance. Everything we have that might punch through them without absolute waves of casualties is with Jon.”

There was a pause just long enough for their minds to arrive at a small, drably-wrapped stone locked up three floors below them.

“Except the obvious,” Harailt said lightly, “of course.”

“I can’t wield it,” she reminded them, massaging the headache behind her nose and thinking of Coronation Day.  That was what she wanted now, for all it had cost them: to reach out her hands and wrap the realm in a shield of fire. 

She looked up to find Harailt smiling tiredly at her.

“Is that what you think, majesty?” he asked.

Omanda and her scouts trooped in before Thayet came up with an answer to that, or even a question. 

“It makes no _sense_ ,” the girl growled as soon as they were settled around the map.  She was tall and graceful-boned, the Riders’ youngest group leader and second former Carthaki slave. 

“I’d swear there’s no way they could know these things,” Thayet said, thinking of the ships.  She ground one knuckle absently against the tabletop.  “I’d _swear_ it. And yet.”

Omanda blinked at her, distracted from her train of thought.

“There’s that, Majesty,” she said, granting the impossible spy with a waved hand, “but I was talking of the tactics.  What do they gain from gadding about out there in the woods?  They don’t have an invasion force.  They don’t have special witchery or tunnels or beasties—we can’t hear ‘em when they plot, but we sure can see, and they’re more or less on their own.  What’s their checkmate?”

“Mayhap they’re just stupid,” offered Daymen, an eastern farmer’s lad. He was the youngest of so many sons, he’d told them, that their father hadn’t needed the help of even a boy so tall and strong as him.  He sounded hopeful, if not especially convinced, and the others chuckled.

“Not Ozorne,” said Omanda.  Her eyes, like Thayet’s, were still fixed on the map.  “Never Ozorne.”

\---

Wyldon was in the courts when she passed them on her way to the stables, occupying the corner nearest the nursery that she and Buri often used. You can’t blame him for choosing a practice court, she told herself, exasperated.  She failed to stop herself from confirming that he still wore the boots with the hole. 

It was getting hot in earnest now, ten days past the solstice. The streets felt dead. She was oddly unsurprised when the cawing started as they approached the Palace Way hill.  The Guards’ bows snapped up, but the gaggle of Stormwings were again conspicuously unarmed.  Protective spells shimmered around the central figure, who was reddish-headed and bronze-skinned. 

“Let’s hear him out,” she told the Guards, blood humming and voice low. The flock landed five yards ahead, giving up the advantage of height.

Ozorne landed last.  He was as Alanna and the others had described him: dreadlocked and magnetic and strange. He was clean of the bloodstains that streaked the others, but gave off the same stink.

“Cousin,” he said, voice rich and warm.  “Queen Thayet.” 

In a very fast beat she noted that he said her name correctly, ta- _yet_ rather than the Tortallan _thigh_ -et, and then edited “correctly” to “the Saren way.”  He’d intended it to throw her, she knew.  That was what his cursed empire did: stole away the dearest bits of other nations, until their own names and homelands and fairytales twisted in their hands. She found she was gut-deep angry.

"Ozorne," she said, gracious as in a ballroom.  "You'll forgive me, I hope, for not knowing your Stormwing name."

Without removing her eyes from his, she registered that a few members of his tribe smirked.  His face darkened in a way most people would have missed but, as he'd implied, neither of them was most people.

“We’ve been enjoying our capital tour,” he smiled, face under control again. “Such lovely countryside. Plenty of food.”

“We’ve been enjoying chasing your little clans around,” she answered, ignoring the unease that welled up in the soldiers around her at the thought of Stormwings feasting.  “They scurry so. I’m sure your example inspires them.”

“I’ll be off soon enough,” he said.  “Don’t worry.”

“And where does that leave your… flock?  Are they your flock?”

“Meet Mailach, my lovely hostess,” he said, indicating a crowned female to his left.  Mailach was young-looking for a Stormwing queen, with small breasts and crazy eyes.  Her consort hulked behind her, notable for his size and air of stupidity.

“We’ll shit on your flesh,” Mailach told her, grinning, “and then we’ll eat it.”

Onua snorted, which made Thayet both love her and think of Buri.

“Where were you yesterday?” Thayet asked Ozorne, keeping her voice relaxed. “When those hurroks dropped by, where were you?”

“Oh, around,” he said.  “So much to plan, you know.”

The quality of the silence changed.

Thayet looked at the Stormwing nearest her, a dark-skinned female whose short shock of hair was ice-gray.  She wasn’t looking back, Thayet realized, but staring into the middle distance with her mouth pinched tight.  All of them were, except Mailach and Ozorne.  What did Stormwings hate that much, she wondered, trying to flip at high speed through everything Daine had said about them.  Nothing came together, not with Ozorne smirking down at her, but little shivers of fear began twitching along her spine.  She wanted to leave, she found.  She needed to be elsewhere.

“We’re done here,” she told the Guard, trying for contempt. 

“Goodbye,” Ozorne said as they wheeled the horses, “cousin.”

She didn’t look back; he hadn’t expected her to.  The Stormwings took off with a clang behind them, cawing like crows as they and their odor gained height. 

Her Dogs galloped out to meet them as they neared the palace, their Rider uniforms thrown on over off-hours undershirts.  They split and closed around her, adding to the ring that separated her from the city.  She remembered teaching them that.

“Centaurs at the far gate, Majesty,” said Omanda, panting.

The City Gate closed behind them as they entered at a gallop. Thayet swung down from Manyat by the stables as the Dogs carried on toward the fighting, angry at herself for leaving her crossbow in the barracks instead of the stall.  She lost three minutes retrieving it. 

It was beautifully done.  Every blade in the palace was heading for the far gate when she looked up toward a tinny shattering sound and saw hurroks swarming the nursery tower.

She didn't remember running, later.  She remembered small, physical things: the burning in her lungs, the catch on her recurve drawing blood from her palm, the silent roar of panic that swamped everything except the knowledge that she was too late, that they were all going to be too late.  She heard the chaos from two floors away, racing past servants and guards who were following the same sound.  She passed the tapestry with the dragons, which Liam loved.  A woman was yelling, Jasson screaming.  _Please,_ she thought, _please,_ and lunged into the room.

The room was shattered, and the fighting was over.  There were her three children, terrified and bloody and alive. She nearly fell.

“ _Mama_ ,” wailed Jasson, raising his arms.  Vania, seeing Thayet, began to shriek as well.  Liam was silent, his hands locked tight on Vania’s shoulders and tears pouring down his cheeks. She crossed the last few feet and reached them, grabbed all of them to her.  They clung, sobbing and warm. 

“Thank you,” she choked, half-aloud.  She said it over and over, first in K’mir and then in Common, to the gods her children knew. 

Her mind cleared as she soothed them, snake-brain reasserting itself enough to notice Senna lying still by the window surrounded by red—she turned their shoulders away, for all the good it could do at this point—and a knot of healers clustered around a man prone by the alcove.  Ulren was there already.  She saw worn boots, which twitched as a healer said something about staying still. Wyldon. 

“Is he dead?” Liam asked, so quietly she had to watch his mouth to understand the words. 

“No, my darling,” she said.  “The healers are helping him.  Let’s—” She looked around for a way out not covered in blood and glass.

“He saved us,” Liam whispered, “but the hurroks got him.” He swallowed, eyes twitching toward where the window had been.  “Is Senna dead?”

“Let’s all go downstairs,” said Thayet, hating her own cowardice. 

Uncle Gareth stood by the door, sweating, sword in one hand and the other on his heart. 

“Stay…” she asked him, looking in the direction of the healers and the boots. He nodded as she led the children out. Liam kept looking back.

The mirror blazed forty minutes later, which Thayet supposed had been long enough for Harailt to get a message through.  She’d bathed them by then, declining the other nursemaids’ help.

Jon was outside this time, somewhere noisy and overbright. Alanna stood beside him, although he was clutching the glass so close to his face that Thayet saw little more of her than a sliver of red hair. 

“Look,” Thayet said to Liam, her voice shaking only the very littlest bit. “It’s Papa.”

“Papa!” yelled Jasson, grabbing at the mirror.  “A hurroks came, Papa!  Senna died!”  It was the way he usually shouted, except for the words and the wild edge.

“Senna?” murmured Vania, half-asleep in Thayet’s arms.  Thayet turned away to soothe her and missed whatever Jon said next, but felt the tension easing in the children’s bodies as he talked. He was good at this, at the kind of explanations that made them feel safe.  It worked on her too sometimes, even when she should know better, even when she could hear the fear at the back of his throat.  She let the sound of his voice wash over her, giving in briefly to the urge to stare at the three of them and shake.

Before they ended the spell she caught the edge of a low-voiced argument between Jon and Alanna: snatches of “hurrok” and “guerilla” and the name Ozorne.

“But what’s he _doing_?” Alanna hissed. “Where’s he going with this?”

She took the mirror from Jon and glared into it from some odd angle, eyes intense as ever.

“Watch him, Thayet,” she said.  “I don't like the pattern here.”

\-----

She left when they were all asleep, even Liam.  On Gareth’s information, she walked to a small room just outside the family wing.  A Cavall man-at-arms stood guard outside, and a gaggle of pages loitered nearby looking lost.

This had been a fawn-colored meeting room; now the central table served as a cot.  A healer in Stone Mountain colors was bent over the swollen place where the training master’s eye should be, and maybe still was.  His right arm was limp—he’d raised it, she expected, to shield his face. She went to his left side, where the eye was open.  It shifted from the ceiling to her face.  He went to form the word “Majesty,” stiff even now. 

She would have stopped him, but the healer beat her to it.

“Don’t talk,” he snapped, blue magic pooling in the places that the tiny movement of Wyldon’s mouth had stretched.  “Your majesty, I fear you are disturbing my patient—”

“Thank you,” said Thayet, ignoring the healer and looking steadily at Wyldon. “Thank you for my children’s lives. She swallowed, strangled both by how much she meant it and how much she resented it.  The single eye watched her, unreadable.  He had children of his own, she remembered—a passel of blond daughters who took after his kind-faced wife.  She supposed they were all in the north this year, holed up in Cavall with the hounds, growing older. 

“Thank you,” she said again.  “My lord and I are in your debt.”  She nodded to the healer and left, pages closing ranks behind her. 

In the barracks Buri was sleeping, face still gray.

“She’s doing well, Majesty,” said Kuri, who Thayet had thought to be dozing in her chair.  “She fights, which I expect you knew.”

\----

She must have slept a little, but knew only because Vania woke her each time she cried.  She left them to ride out, although all three cried again. Every street was silent and horrible. She stared straight ahead at first, avoiding the signs against evil that flickered at chest-level as she passed, but caught herself and went back to meeting eyes. It was what you did.  It was the last thing you did, if it had to be. 

Meetings happened, although there seemed to be little for anyone to say.

She thought in tasks and short sentences and long blanks. Onua was a wordless shadow.  It was afternoon by the time she stepped outside again.  She paused by the stables, trying to come up with something else to do. She stared vacantly around, and then her blood stuttered.  Here was the final proof that flatlanders never looked up: Ozorne was sitting on the curtain wall, empty-handed and smirking.

She could shoot him, said the same flat voice that had told her to put on her tunic that morning, buckle Manyat’s girth, nod her head. Witchings wouldn’t help against a shot from three feet away.  He’d let her get close.  She moved in the automatic way she had all day. 

“Thayet—” Onua said behind her, but Thayet was already walking. Onua climbed with her into the tower, up the silent stairs (she felt the dash to the nursery in the backs of her thighs), and out into the light.  Corus glittered below them, rolling down to the river.  She glanced once, not flinching, and turned to Ozorne.

“Cousin,” he said, eyes horrible. 

“My children live,” she told him.  “My friend lives.  You’re going to burn.”

“I watched your ride today,” he said pleasantly.  “Did you know they call you the foreign witch? Ironic, I know. I hear it was ‘Famine Witch’ after your coronation, but there’s no famine yet this year—only war, and you.”

She pushed back on pain and its echo of anger, trying to focus on the facts.

“You abandoned your people.” She was heartened to hear that her voice sounded cool.  “Your allies are turning on you.  You’re the Emperor Mage of nowhere.  You could win this whole war and still not hold a throne.  I’m curious—what does schoolyard bullying gain you?”

Ozorne smiled, then.  It was the enormous, glittering smile of a triumphant king, and there was a rattling thump as one of his tribe landed on the walkway behind Onua, cutting them off from the tower door.  A dozen more launched screaming from the far side of the tower roof, where they must have hidden for hours.  The first thought through Thayet’s head, after the strangled blast of understanding, was that she was going to die in a high place after all. 

“Goodbye, Thayet jian Wilima,” said Ozorne, flapping almost lazily above them. His flock was everywhere now, circling in a narrowing swarm.

But it _hadn’t started yet_ , was the thing.  Time slowed down the way it always did for Thayet in the last moments before violence. The arrogant idiot was prancing around like a storybook villain, still talking.  She moved, expecting every second to feel claws: three big steps toward the parapet, Onua’s arm in the hand that wasn’t reaching for her recurve; a back-to-back stance; aim; fire. Mailach’s consort flew into her arrow, his own speed adding to its momentum, and fell without crying out as it erased his eye. Thayet heard guards shouting on the ground and spared a thought for their response time—one minute?  three?-- but now the Stormwings were screaming, and with their attack came a wall of stench and fear that erased everything else. 

It rolled over them in waves, mammering through her brain like all the worst things: she saw her parents’ palace, the burning road through Sarain, the Tortallan famines, the nursery stairs.  The knowledge of the drop behind her shrilled up through her body.

Against it all she slammed the cold evidence that _she’d been right_ —because the tower was so close on her left and Onua’s right, the Stormwings couldn’t fly at them except from a handful of angles. Sealing off everything but her eyes and arms she shot over and over, aiming into the sky.  Onua leaned forward once to retch and then kept shooting; she, too, was hitting her targets. 

Thayet found she was swearing—a rough, even stream of multilingual profanity. Onua was silent except for her heavy breath.  Thayet heard it catching in her throat sometimes as she fought off panic, and pressed back toward her to give her what comfort she could.  Onua wasn’t a soldier, but here she stood.  The Stormwings pulled back a few feet, waiting.  How many arrows did they have left?  She tried to remember, afraid to stop aiming long enough to look—a minute’s worth?

The door burst open, and her heart leapt until a small figure came through it alone, in baggy university robes. 

“Get gone!” yelled Ulren, as if he was shouting at geese. Ozorne only laughed, delighted, and Thayet thought she would choke on rage and sorrow. 

“One of your strays?” he asked her.  He raised his wings and took off, flapping slowly above where Ulren stood. “Do you know how you’re going to die, boy?”

Ulren ignored him.  A ball of crystal light was growing between his hands.

“He’s a healer,” she said, half-hating herself for trying. “He’s a child.”

“Have you ever dreamed of flying, little healer?  Or of falling?” 

“Thayet,” hissed Onua, loosing an arrow.  Thayet saw the Stormwings, quiet now, circling closer. 

“Bones smash when you fall,” Ozorne said, velvet as a lover. He descended by inches, claws stretched toward the unresisting nape of Ulren’s neck.  “Organs burst.  Faces… faces smear.  But I hear the view beforehand is quite something.” 

Ulren looked up, joyous, and the glow-ball exploded into a blinding field of loud white light. 

Thayet’s eyes were somehow shielded; she saw the brightness as if through tinted glass; but Ozorne screamed in pain, wings and arms flung back as if he’d been shot.  Guards and Riders burst through the door as it faded, spraying arrows at the fleeing Stormwings. Four of the Immortals clanged into the ramparts, although she saw Ozorne reach clear air. Hands grabbed all three of them and hustled them down the stairs.  In a moment she was sitting at the base of the great wall, battle blood still slamming through her temples, telling the hands that she was somehow, miraculously, fine.

“ _What,_ ” she said to Ulren, which was as close as she could come to a coherent question.

He looked at her helplessly, grinning.

“I can’t do battle magic, mum” he said, “but you need light in a sickroom, and sound and light are cousins, like.  That was just… bigger.” 

“Bigger,” Onua repeated, almost philosophically, from her spot next to Thayet. She leaned against the wall and closed her eyes.  Riders were whooping around them, terror dissolving into giddiness. 

“This is more fun than the university, mum,” Ulren volunteered.

“I claim him,” said Kuri, who’d arrived with the swarm. “Baird’ll train him after the war, I suppose, but I claim him for now.  If we’re going to have crazy Rider Commanders, I could use a hand.”

She turned to Omanda, who’d taken a graze to the shoulder, and Ulren scrambled up to help.  From her surprisingly comfortable seat on the stone, she watched him bounce over to his teacher, awkward energy not visibly dampened by having turned back Carthak’s Emperor Mage.  She thought of Numair working with Jon, and Daine with Numair. 

“Where are they _coming_ from,” she murmured, “all these terrifying little bright sparks?”

“The same place I did, more or less,” Onua said, eyes still closed. Her massive dog had galloped up to them and was licking her face.  “And if you keep making this the place they come to, you’ll have quite a fire.”

“We’ll take her in, then,” Kuri said, steering a grumpy-looking Omanda toward the infirmary, “if you’re alright to move.”

Thayet frowned, remembering something else.  She turned to Ulren. 

“Why were you even there?  In the tower?”

He brightened, as if reminded of a friend. 

“I was coming to show you, mum.  Majesty.” 

He opened one fist to reveal a ball of darkness, which sat up and nodded its head at her. 

“Queen!” said the darkness, plainly thrilled.  “Clever queen kill Stormwings!”

“Majesty,” corrected a second lump, poking its head out of Ulren’s tunic. “Name is Majesty.”

“Name Thayet,” countered the first lump.  “Job Queen.  ‘Majesty’ an hon-or-if-ic.”

 This won the debate, and pre-empted a moment of silence.

“Perhaps,” Thayet said, hauling herself up the wall, “we had better speak privately.”

\----

 After hearing from the darkings, she rode out. 

“Aren’t you _tired_?” asked Harailt, and she was—dizzy-tired, bone-ache tired—but it was no longer the sort of tired that bothered her.  All the things she had to do before she slept were good ones. 

Her Dogs joined them at the bottom of the long hill. It was coming on toward evening, and would storm in the night.  The damp, hot air was heavy in her lungs but good on her sore shoulders. The stallkeepers stopped their end-of-day packing as the horses came down Market Street.  They’d seen the light-burst, she supposed, and the falling Stormwings. No one cheered in this war, but today the children waved.  Thunder stirred in the west.  She smelled rain.

The ride back was fuzzier.  Stefan had Manyat’s reins and was grooming him by the time she’d registered that she was on the ground.  In the same haze she checked on Buri, who was awake enough now to have bullied the story out of Ulren. 

 “You _didn’t_ ,” she growled as Thayet entered, more forcefully than should have been possible for someone who couldn’t sit up yet.  “Tell me you haven’t grown that Bian-cursed, lowlander-brained _stupid_.”  Her pride was visible behind the outrage, if you knew how to look.  Kuri was sleeping, as was Wyldon when Thayet looked in on her way to the family wing.  The Cavall guard glared at her, and the page on duty stared in awe.  Someone had finally removed the man's boots. 

By the time she lay down among her children the room was spinning. Little fireworks of relief went off in her back as it hit the mattress.  Liam stirred and snuggled closer to her; the other two lay still. She watched them until her eyes closed, and then they were all down by the Olorun, paddling at the water’s edge.  Roald held Lianne a few feet farther out—she hadn’t learned to swim yet, but this was the summer that she would.  Kally was calling to him, galloping along the bank faster than she should, hair streaming out.  Thayet looked again; in the way of dreams, Kally had become Kalasin, tall on that grand gray mare.  It was Thayet who sat on her first pony, Thanhyien rolling out around her.  They were finishing the long ride from the mountains.  Kalasin said dull things about herbs.  Above them was that place’s cathedral sky, towers of summer cloud mirrored in the lake.  Light everywhere.  

Thayet lost the dream before they reached the city—Vania woke crying— but they rode close enough to hear the bells ringing for them, two nations' worth of temple bells chiming them home.  

**Author's Note:**

> If you'd like to google-image up some illustrations, this version of Thanhyien sits beside Burma’s Inle Lake. 
> 
> I haven’t read the Beka Cooper books, which I assume provide a lot more detail about Corus—please forgive any geographical liberties I’ve taken here. 
> 
> No copyright infringement intended. All feedback truly welcome.


End file.
